Danitsia

From the desk of our founder, Maria “Danitsia/Pandora” Espino:

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my failures as Guild Master of TLP.

There are things I wish I had handled differently. Decisions I would change if I could. Conversations I should have had sooner. People I wish I had listened to better. Moments when I was too stubborn, too emotional, too focused on keeping everything together to realize that sometimes holding on too tightly can cause things to break anyway.

And then there are the Olympians… Losing that team, and especially losing some of the friendships that came with it, hurt me far more deeply than I think most people ever realized. Maybe part of that is because they weren’t just people I raided with. They were my friends. Or at least, I believed they were.

And to understand why that mattered so much to me, you have to understand something about the person sitting behind the Guild Master title.

The Part of My Life Most People Don’t See

I live with Cystic Fibrosis.

Every day, I spend more than four hours doing treatments just to continue fighting a disease that has already taken an enormous amount from me, most especially a brother that I never saw grow up and grow old. More recently, I was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis Related Diabetes (CF-RD). It has characteristics of both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and it added yet another complicated medical reality to a life that was already defined by treatments, medications, doctors, oxygen, appointments, and the constant awareness that my health can change.

I still work full time. Not because I wake up every morning excited about going to work, but because life still has bills. The job can drain what little energy I have left after dealing with CF, but it helps keep my life afloat. Then Loki got cancer. My eight-year-old Maine Coon isn’t “just a cat” to me. He is family. And suddenly, amid everything else, I found myself dealing with the fear that I could lose him too.

There is also another reality that sits quietly in the background of nearly everything I do. I need to remain close to Phoenix Children’s Hospital and the Mayo Clinic because there is always the possibility that someday my lungs will deteriorate to the point where a double lung transplant becomes part of the conversation. In 2017, it did. My lung function dropped so drastically, I had to spend an entire week doing the lung transplant evaluation with Mayo.

That possibility has a strange way of changing how you look at time. It always has. It’s why birthdays are something I truly appreciate getting to celebrate.

CF Can Make the World Very Small

There are places I would love to go. People I desperately want to see. My family is back in New York, but flying isn’t simple for me. The amount of oxygen I would need makes ordinary air travel incredibly difficult. So I can’t just hop on a plane and fly home when I’m lonely.

And I am lonely.

Probably more often than I have ever admitted. COVID made that loneliness much worse. I lost 22 people with CF whom I knew to COVID. Some of them had better lung function than I do. Think about what that does to your perception of risk. When you watch people living with the same disease you have die, including people who appeared healthier than you, fear stops being theoretical.

The world outside your home begins to look different.

So while everyone else eventually began talking about getting “back to normal,” I never completely went back. Maybe I’m still afraid. Actually, there is no “maybe” about it. I am. And that fear, combined with CF and the physical limitations it places on me, has made building friendships in the traditional sense incredibly difficult.

Which brings me back to World of Warcraft.

These Aren’t Just Pixels to Me

For some people, WoW is just a game.

You log in.

You raid.

You kill bosses.

You collect loot.

You log out.

For me, it became something else.

It became one of the few places where my disease doesn’t immediately determine what I’m allowed to do. Although, since the stroke I had in July 2025 made it far more difficult to enjoy the high-performing aspects of the game. I still can do almost anything in WoW. There, I can meet someone without explaining the oxygen canula I often have to wear or why I am coughing non-stop; no I don’t have the plague OR COVID. I can laugh with people without worrying about whether being in the same room with them could make me sick. I can spend a raid night wiping on a boss and complaining about mechanics and, for a few hours, just be another person frustrated that somebody stood in the fire.

More importantly, I can have friends.

Real friends.

And maybe that’s why I’ve sometimes expected too much from the friendships I’ve made here. I’ve had so little access to ordinary social connection in real life that I probably placed more emotional weight on some of these relationships than the people on the other side ever realized. Maybe I thought some friendships were deeper than they actually were. That is difficult to admit. But it is true.

Losing the Olympians

When the old Olympians fell apart, I didn’t just see a raid team disappear. I watched friends leave. And that broke something in me.

I thought some of those people understood what I was going through. I thought they understood the battles taking place behind the screen. I thought knowing those things meant they would give me a little more grace when I wasn’t the perfect Guild Master. I thought they would stick by me.

Some didn’t.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether that was my fault. In some cases, I’m sure part of it was. I made mistakes. No one’s perfect. I’ve gotten defensive. I’ve tried too hard to protect structures I believed were necessary. I’ve struggled to communicate things that made perfect sense in my own head but didn’t make sense to everyone else. And sometimes I have been so overwhelmed trying to keep my real life together that I simply haven’t been the leader people needed me to be.

I own that.

Being sick doesn’t magically make every decision I make correct. It doesn’t erase the impact my mistakes have on other people. CF can explain some of my behavior. It cannot excuse all of it. That’s an important distinction. But losing people I genuinely cared about still hurt. Because somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing them as characters on a roster. They became part of my life.

Then We Rebuilt

There were moments when walking away from TLP would have been easier. Instead, a handful of people did something incredibly important and to some extent, took the more difficult option…

They stayed.

More than that, they tried to understand. They said, “You know what, this does work and it is better than just struggling against a roster boss that kicks everyone in the teeth.” They cared enough to look past the Guild Master title and recognize that there was a human being underneath it who was struggling. I will forever be thankful to Fell, Ghad, Knetik, Toki, the old timers that love it here. But also Chimeric and Frost (who had been fairly new to our guild when it all went down!). With their help, we rebuilt.

Not one raid team.

Two.

I am incredibly proud of that. We really all should be. Even those that left, they look at us and say, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Not because having multiple teams gives us bragging rights, but because those teams represent something I desperately needed to believe:

Something can break without being permanently broken.

TLP survived. I survived. And we kept moving forward.

Why I Cling to One Raid Unit

People haven’t always agreed with my philosophy that TLP should operate as one raid unit made up of multiple teams, with those teams feeding into and supporting the highest progression team.

I understand the criticism. And I’ll be the first person to admit that the system isn’t perfect. Nothing involving human beings ever is. But there is a reason I believe in it so strongly. I don’t want a guild where every raid team is its own little island. I want movement between teams. I want players to develop. I want someone who starts farther down the progression ladder to have somewhere to go when they grow. I want our teams to succeed together.

The top team should benefit from the strength of the teams beneath it, but the relationship also has to work in the opposite direction. Knowledge, experience, leadership, and opportunity should flow back through the entire raid unit. When one team struggles, we should help. When one team succeeds, TLP succeeds as a whole, a collective unit.

Not everybody will agree with that structure. That’s okay. But through one of the hardest periods of my life, that structure helped us keep moving instead of collapsing. It gave me something I desperately needed.

A framework for rebuilding.

Maybe Structure Is How I Survive Chaos

I’ve thought about why structure matters so much to me. Maybe when so much of your life is outside your control, you start clinging tightly to the things you can control. I can’t control Cystic Fibrosis. I can’t control CF-related diabetes. I can’t control how many hours of treatments my body requires. I can’t control Loki having cancer. I can’t control whether my lungs deteriorate. I can’t control needing to stay near hospitals because someday I may need new lungs. I can’t control being unable to simply board an airplane and visit my family in New York. I couldn’t control COVID. And I certainly couldn’t control losing 22 people from the CF community.

But I can make a raid schedule.I can organize a guild. I can build teams. I can create a structure where people have somewhere to belong and somewhere to grow. Maybe sometimes I’ve held onto that structure too tightly. That’s something I don’t think will change. But I also understand now why it means so much to me.

When your real life can feel completely uncontrollable, there is tremendous comfort in building something that has order.

So Yes, I’ve Failed

I’ve failed as Guild Master sometimes. I’ve made bad calls. I’ve misunderstood people. I’ve allowed my emotions to influence decisions. I’ve expected loyalty because I thought a friendship meant more than perhaps it actually did. I’ve probably confused being needed with being valued. And sometimes I’ve been so desperate to keep TLP together that I forgot the people inside it mattered more than the organizational chart around them. Those are things I have to own.

But failure isn’t the entire story. Because I’m still here. We’re still here. Against everything happening in my life, I still show up. Some days that means treatments, work, medical appointments, worry about Loki, fear about my lungs, and then logging into Discord and trying to solve a raid problem.

Sometimes I am exhausted before the raid even starts. Sometimes I’m scared. Most times, I’m lonely. And sometimes that little Discord notification sound means more to me than the person sending the message could possibly understand. Because there is another human being on the other side.

To the People Who Stayed

I don’t know if the people who stayed truly understand what they did for me. You didn’t just help me rebuild raid teams.

You helped me rebuild something in myself.

You reminded me that losing people doesn’t mean everyone leaves. You reminded me that friendship can still exist even when it starts with two characters standing in the same digital world. And you gave me something incredibly precious: Something to look forward to.

Maybe someday my world will get bigger again. Maybe someday I’ll be less afraid. Maybe someday AI-generated DNA-tailored medication will make travel easier and I’ll finally get back to New York to hug my family instead of seeing them through a screen. I don’t know.

There are a lot of things about my future that I can’t control.

For now, though, I have TLP, a beautiful gift left here by my late husband Luke (Marius/Beelzebubba) that keeps me ethereally connected to him. I have this wonderfully frustrating, imperfect, occasionally dysfunctional collection of people we’ve somehow managed to keep together. I have four raid teams that exist because people refused to give up. I have friends. And I have hope.

I’m not writing this because I want sympathy. I’m writing it because I want people to understand something I should probably have said a long time ago: TLP has never just been a guild to me.

In a life where disease and death has steadily made my physical world smaller, this community made my world bigger. That’s also why losing people from it can hurt me far more than perhaps it should. I’m learning that. I’m learning that leadership sometimes means letting people leave without interpreting their departure as proof that I wasn’t worth staying for. I’m learning that friendship can’t be measured by a raid roster. And I’m learning to give myself some of the grace that I have spent years trying to give everyone else.

I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know what CF has planned for me. But I know what I’m going to do today.

Treatments.

Work.

Take care of Loki.

Log in.

And keep building.

Because sometimes keeping something alive isn’t about never failing. Sometimes it’s about finding the strength to rebuild after you do. Its resilience.

<3 Dani